An extraordinary escape: survivors of migrant boat disaster tell their stories
An extraordinary escape: survivors of migrant boat disaster tell their stories
Eight hundred died when a ship carrying African migrants sunk in the
Mediterranean in April. Three young men – among just 28 survivors –
recall the journey and how they survived
Migrants crowd the deck of their wooden boat off the coast of Libya.
Photograph: Reuters
When more than 800 people drowned last month in the Mediterranean’s worst modern shipwreck, Ibrahim Mbalo almost joined the dead at the bottom of the sea.
As the boat began to sink below the surface, Mbalo, a 20-year-old
Gambian labourer, was trapped underwater below decks, unable to escape.
When the water gushed in, another drowning man had pulled him by his
trousers towards the bottom of the flooded cabin, which was now
essentially a massive water tank filled with flailing men. Mbalo was
stuck.
“Will I die?” he thought as he was dragged downwards. “Or will I survive?”
Through extraordinary perseverance and luck, Mbalo achieved the
latter – one of just 28 young men to make it out alive. In exclusive
interviews with the Guardian, three of them have for the first time
given lengthy accounts of their ordeal. Their testimonies constitute the
most detailed public record yet of both the disaster and the lives of
its protagonists.
Samba Kamar, 20, hadn’t even wanted to be on the boat in the first
place. He had left home in Mali in 2013 after family differences, and
then civil war, made life untenable. He worked his way north to Libya
over the course of a couple of months, paying different smugglers to
drive him in packed cars through the desert. At each way-station on the
route, Kamar worked as a labourer to pay for the next leg of the
journey. He almost died of thirst in the desert south of Libya after his
smuggler’s car broke down and left them stranded for days. He was
beaten and robbed in Sabha, southern Libya, before arriving in Tripoli near the end of 2013.
How the story of the migrant boat disaster unfolded
For a year, Kamar worked as a labourer for a wealthy Libyan.
Sometimes the man would pay him 100 dinars (about £50) for a month’s
work, but usually he wouldn’t. By the end of February 2015, Kamar hadn’t
been paid for four months. Enough was enough, and Kamar told his boss
he wanted his money so he could pay for the trip back to Mali.
But instead of paying Kamar in cash, the man said he’d simply pay for
the trip directly, and handed Kamar directly to a smuggler.
“I thought I was going to Mali,” Kamar remembered. “But he took me in
a car for about 50km and he left me in a place where there were people
like me.” Kamar recognised one of them: it was his 17-year-old
half-brother Yamadou, who had arrived separately in Libya.
Samba Kamar, originally from Mali, one of 28 survivors from the
Mediterranean’s deadliest modern shipwreck. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley
for the Guardian
By Kamar’s account, he, Yamadou and their fellow prisoners were held
under duress in a cramped house for a month and 18 days. “Then some
armed people showed up and said: ‘You have to go on a boat.’”
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Omar
Diawara, a 23-year-old from Mali, has a similar story. He left home
because of the war, with the idea of going to Libya to earn enough money
to continue his education once tensions had subsided in Bamako, Mali’s
capital. Once in Tripoli, Diawara worked as a day-labourer until two men
approached him in the street and offered him a job. He got into their
car – and they kidnapped him.
He was held on his own for six weeks as his kidnappers tried to
extract a ransom. “They asked me for money,” Diawara said. “They asked
me to call my family but I don’t have any parents. And then they
realised I didn’t have any money.”
He briefly escaped, but three days later was caught again by the same
gang. This time they locked him in a house near the sea. “I spent a
month and two weeks there,” Diawara says. “Then one night they told me
to board a small rubber boat.”
Of the three, Mbalo was the only one who had wanted to go to Europe
– and even then it was not his first choice. He arrived in Tripoli last
September, after a six-month stop-start odyssey from his Gambian home
on Banjul Island. In happier times, he spent his weekends swimming in
the sea. But after his father stopped working and could no longer pay
for his education, Mbalo dropped out of school and went to Libya to make
money.
Omar Diawara left Mali to try to earn enough money to continue his
education once tensions had subsided in the country. Photograph: Patrick
Kingsley for the Guardian
Unlike many African migrants in Libya, Mbalo found work with a man
who paid him a daily wage, and treated him with relative respect. But
even then, Mbalo found Libya a nightmare: it is a country in the throes
of a civil war. So after a few months he told his boss he wanted to
leave. He would have returned home if he could. But having experienced
the trauma of the desert journey once on the way up, Mbalo wasn’t keen
to try it again. “If you’re going to the Gambia, maybe the smugglers
will take you in the desert and throw you there to die,” Mbalo says.
“That’s why a lot of people won’t go back.”
Instead, Mbalo’s boss, Moussa, drove him to Garabulli, a known
smuggling hub on the Libyan coast that lies east of Tripoli. There,
Moussa paid a smuggler 700 dinar (about £350) to put Mbalo on a boat.
And then, like the others, Mbalo was taken to a holding house, where he
was shoved in a room already packed with fellow migrants. There by
chance he was reunited with his friend Haroun, with whom he had shared
the journey north from the Gambia. One night two weeks later, they
finally made the short drive to the sea. Or, as Mbalo calls it, the
river.
On the beach, Mbalo, Diawara and Kamar found hundreds of other migrants waiting in the darkness. There were those from west Africa
– Senegal, Sierra Leone and Mali – and those from the east: Somalia and
Eritrea. Some were even from as far away as Bangladesh. What they paid
differed from migrant to migrant, depending on how much smugglers had
thought they could afford. A few paid as much as 7,000 dinars (about
£3,500). Diawara paid nothing, for reasons that remain unclear.
Mediterranean migrants arrive in Italy after one died of suffocation on an overcrowded boat
Armed with guns, the smugglers divided them up into about eight or
nine groups of up to 100 migrants each. And then a series of large
rubber dinghies arrived.
Mbalo was frightened. “Either I will die,” he thought, “or I will go to Italy. Or [Libyan coastguards] will arrest me and take me to prison, and I will pay 500 dinar to get out.”
The Italian coastguard ship Bruno Gregoretti, carrying survivors of the
boat that overturned off the coast of Libya, arrives at Catania on 20
April. Photograph: Carmelo Imbesi/AP
Each group was herded on to a separate dinghy, and told on pain of
death to remain seated. According to Italian prosecutors, one man who
did stand up was thrown by smugglers into the sea to drown. Each boat
took 20 minutes to reach a larger ship moored a mile or so out to sea.
The overwhelming majority of ships that go from Libya to Italy are
wooden fishing sloops or inflatable dinghies. This one was a huge
steel-hulled merchant ship.
The loading of the ship took several hours, and lasted until the
small hours of the following morning. Armed men directed each migrant to
a specific place on the boat, so that its cargo was equally spread. The
survivors’ descriptions of the boat’s layout do not completely align,
but they believe there were at least three levels: one at the bottom
next to the engine, a second in the middle with windows, and a third at
the top that was outdoors.
Diawara was placed on the deck outside, at the bow of the green ship.
Kamar was shoved into the middle level. And Mbalo was forced down to
the very bottom.
The heat of the engine made the experience unbearable. But the armed
smugglers arranging the rows of migrants would not let Mbalo move. “I
couldn’t go out,” he said. “If I’d tried, they would have killed me.”
Upstairs, life wasn’t much better for Kamar. “As soon as I got on the
boat I fell ill,” he said. “I felt dizzy because the boat was tilting
from side.” And he wasn’t the only one – all around him people were
feeling sea sick. “I was vomiting, there were a lot of people vomiting.”
Eventually, not long before dawn, most of the smugglers disembarked.
According to Italian prosecutors, they left only a Tunisian – Mohammed
Ali Malek – to steer the ship, and a Syrian, Mahmoud Bikhit, to act as
his mate. Later arrested in Italy, Malek stands accused of mass murder,
but his lawyer says he was merely a passenger. “He is the last person
responsible, not the first,” Malek’s lawyer, Massimo Ferrante, told the
Guardian, arguing that the Tunisian was picked out by survivors merely
because he has pale skin.
As the boat moved off, Mbalo was now free to move, so he picked his
way through the other migrants to the middle level, where he sat next to
his friend Haroun. It was a decision that would later help save his
life. At around the same time, Kamar also experienced what would turn
out to be a life-changing moment. Overcome with nausea, and covered in
vomit, he was ushered by those around him to the deck outdoors.
For about 18 hours, the boat headed north without incident. Every so
often, Diawara says the Syrian mate would descend from the bridge to the
engine room, to check it was still running smoothly. The boat travelled
slowly, and by about 11pm on Saturday 18 April, it was still only 17
miles from the Libyan coast, and 130 miles from Lampedusa, the
southern-most Italian island.
Mohammed Ali Malek (below, centre), later arrested on suspicion of
people smuggling, on the Italian coastguard ship Bruno Gregoretti.
Photograph: Darrin Zammit Lupi /Reuters
But boats heading north to Italy don’t always need to reach Italian
waters. Sometimes they sail as far as international waters, call Italian
coastguards for assistance and wait for the nearest European boat to
rescue them. In this case, the coastguards in Rome called for assistance
from the closest commercial boat, a Madeiran cargo ship called the King
Jacob, a vast vessel 146 metres long. One hundred metres from the
migrant boat, its sailors later reported, the King Jacob slowed to a
halt.
Over on the smaller boat, Mbalo remembers one of the two crew members
then descending to the lower decks. “The big boat is coming,” he told
the migrants, reminding them to avoid sudden movements in case they
overbalance the boat. “Everybody sit still, and go one by one to the big
boat.”
Quite what happened next may never be properly understood. Sitting
sea sick on the deck, Kamar was drifting in and out of consciousness,
unaware of an impending rescue. Mbalo was below deck, unable to see
anything. Diawara was awake and outside, but like everyone else could
not see what the captain was doing at the wheel.
What seems clear is that as the migrant boat approached the King
Jacob, it suddenly sped up. The reasons why, and how, may ultimately be
known only to the man at the wheel. But the result was the mother of all
T-bone collisions, as the boat hit the side of the King Jacob.
According to Diawara, the boat’s bow swung 90 degrees to the left, until
the two ships were parallel. Then it began to capsize. Sitting at the
back, Diawara says he suddenly found himself next to the King Jacob. In
the seconds before the boat began to keel over, he leapt into the
merchant ship. By his account, he never touched the water.
Five key migration routes into Europe – map
A few metres away, Kamar woke up with a start. All he remembers is
the jolt of the crash, and the subsequent chaos. “I didn’t understand
anything,” he said. “Somebody told me the boat hit the one in front” –
but that was all.
Shocked and nauseous, survival instinct nevertheless kicked in. As
the boat began to tip, Kamar grabbed the nearest thing to hand: a bit of
rope tied to the ship. For a while he gripped the rope, suspended in
mid-air. Then he let himself fall into the sea, and grabbed a piece of
passing debris. Bobbing in the water, he was spotted by the King Jacob’s
Filipino crew. They threw him a lifeline, and hauled him up the side of
the ship – one of 22 men they saved that night.
Trapped inside the hull of the migrants’ boat, Mbalo faced a fate far
worse. After the collision, the hundreds stuck with him inside had
tried to escape. But with so many people swarming the handful of exits,
few made it. Most were still inside as the boat dipped below the surface
and the water flooded in. Many couldn’t swim, so they grabbed at
whatever was to hand. One man found Mbalo’s trouser leg, and dragged him
downwards.
“Will I die?” Mbalo wondered. “Or will I survive?”
Life in the Gambia was what had driven him to this wretched point.
But as he struggled beneath the surface, his upbringing was also what
saved him. All those weekends in the sea off Banjul Island had made him a
strong swimmer, and as a big man with big lungs he had become used to
swimming for long periods underwater.
So when his neighbour gripped his leg and wouldn’t let go, Mbalo
didn’t panic. He says he unzipped his trousers, wriggled free, ripped
off his shirt, pushed through a mass of flailing bodies to the top of
the cabin, before forcing his way through an open window and struggling
to the surface. And then he gasped.
His friend Haroun had drowned. So had Kamar’s brother, Yamadou. But
after being submerged underwater for three or four minutes, Mbalo had
survived.
Mineo migrant camp, which once housed the families of US sailors posted
to Sicily, is now the home of about 3,000 asylum seekers, including
several shipwreck survivors. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the
Guardian
The trauma did not end there. By now the King Jacob was some distance
away, and every time Mbalo put in a burst to try to reach it, he felt
as if the waves pushed him even farther away. “I tried and tried – and
then I saw another boat,” Mbalo said. “I followed that boat. I followed
and followed. And then they saw me coming.”
The crew flung him a lifeline, and with his last grains of energy
Mbalo gripped it and held on until they tugged him to the deck. He stood
up. And then he collapsed.
A month on, he and his fellow survivors face an uncertain fate. They
are living in an unlikely setting – a village in a remote Sicilian
valley that was built for the families of US sailors working at a nearby
naval base. Half a decade ago it was converted into a camp to house
asylum seekers like Mbalo. But the streets still have names such as
Constitution Avenue and Intrepid Lane.
Whether they can stay has yet to be confirmed, and depends on a
lengthy asylum application process. While Diawara waits, he is learning
Italian and English. He has a basic phone now, and plays with a language
app that teaches him the linguistic basics.
Mbalo has a different goal. “I want to work,” he says. “I can do any
type of job. Any type of job, I can do it.” How does he feel to be
alive? “I thank God,” he says. “I’m very happy.”
But then he takes off his cheap sunglasses to reveal a pair of bloodshot eyes. He says they’re still red from the sea salt.
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